Intelligent Match: Intelligent business matchmaking for specific goods with Linked Open Data

Research Areas

Semantic Web and Linked Data for E-Commerce

In this area, we are working on e-commerce paradigms, components, methodologies, data sets, user studies, and reference implementations based on the exchange of information between market participants in the form of machine-suitable structured data over the World Wide Web.

Core activities are:

GoodRelations: An OWL DL ontology for data interoperability for e-commerce at Web Scale. Since 11/2012, GoodRelations is the official e-commerce core of schema.org, the data markup standard of major search engines, namely Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex.

Product ontologies, in particular methodologies and tools for deriving product ontologies from product classification standards and other non-ontological resources, and individual ontology engineering challenges in that field.

Shared Data Structures at Scale

In this area, we are analyzing the theoretical and practical challenges of establishing, populating, maintaining, consuming, and deprecating data structures in large, distributed settings like the World Wide Web.

Information Quality Management with Semantic Technology

In this area, we develop, apply, and evaluate methodologies, vocabularies, and softwate components for managing information quality in closed and open settings on the basis of ontologies and other components from the W3C Semantic Web technology stack.

Research Grants and Externally Funded Activities

Ongoing Projects

OPDM: Ontology-based Product Data Management

The main objective of OPDM project is to develop an application that can be integrated into existing shop systems, product information systems, and third party applications and is able to handle product data based on individual domain ontologies. Applications that will use OPDM as “data middleware” will be able to participate within Semantic Web-based e-commerce scenarios immediately, without having to develop individual add-ons or extensions for their application systems.

Intelligent Match: Intelligent Business Matchmaking for Specific Goods with Linked Open Data

In this project, we work on the technological foundations and a prototype for better precision and a higher degree of automation of business matchmaking for specific goods, based on the GoodRelations ontology and Semantic Web components.

BauDataWeb: The European Building and Construction Materials Database for the Semantic Web

With this project, we expose a major dataset of the European building and construction materials market for the Semantic Web on the basis of the GoodRelations Web Vocabulary for E-Commerce. This allows for the fine-grained search for products, suppliers, and warehouses for any building-related sourcing needs.

BauDataWeb is one of the largest and richest public datasets for a well-defined vertical sector that is available on the Semantic Web. It covers a major share of the European market.

One paramount problem for E-Commerce solutions based on Semantic Web technology is the lack of high-quality ontologies for products and services, in particular such that are up-to-date. In the myOntology project, we use the infrastructure and culture of Wikis as an ontology workbench that fosters true collaborative, community-driven ontology creation and maintenance in the products and services domain, and establish a standardized framework for ontology-based products and services description for E-Commerce applications.

MUSING aims at developing a new generation of Business Intelligence (BI) tools and modules founded on semantic-based knowledge and content systems. MUSING will integrate Semantic Web and Human Language technologies and combine declarative rule-based methods and statistical approaches for enhancing the technological foundations of knowledge acquisition and reasoning in BI applications.

SUPER: Semantics Utilised for Process management within and between EnteRprises

The goal of this project is to combine Semantic Web services and Business Process Management, and develop one consolidated technology. Specifically, we will create horizontal ontologies which describe business processes; vertical telecommunications oriented ontologies to support domain-specific annotation for our chosen economic sector; and a suite of tools based on the results of the European projects SEKT and DIP.

Open Source Software

Ongoing Projects

Completed Projects

While there exists numerous hierarchical classifications for many domains of interest, the number of respective domain ontologies in OWL or RDF-S is still limited. Such classifications can be reused for building respective ontologies, but this process is not as trivial as one may assume. We have developed a generic algorithm and online tool that can convert hierarchical classifications available in the W3C SKOS format into consistent OWL DLP / Lite ontologies.

myClassify: Open-Source API for the classification of product data using machine-learning

A recurring task in managing catalogs and other data of Web offerings is the proper classification of individual products according to a given hierarchy. myClassify is an open-source API that implements standard machine-learning algorithms for the classification of product descriptions.

Other Activities

The Automotive Ontology Working Group is an informal group of individuals and corporations who want to advance the use of shared conceptual structures in the form of Web ontologies for better data interoperability in the automotive industry, and this at Web scale. In particular, we want to develop extension proposals for schema.org so that automotive information can be better understood by search engines and OWL Web ontologies for the automotive industry.

Also, we want to provide a forum for bringing together researchers and practitioners who are working on advancing the field.

OntoGame: Weaving the Semantic Web by Online Games

Despite significant advancement in technology and tools, building ontologies, annotating data, and aligning multiple ontologies remain tasks that highly depend on human intelligence, both as a source of domain expertise and for making conceptual choices. This means that people need to contribute time, and sometimes other resources, to this endeavor.

As a novel solution, we have proposed to masquerade core tasks of weaving the Semantic Web behind on-line, multi-player game scenarios, in order to create proper incentives for humans to contribute. Doing so, we adopt the findings from the already famous "games with a purpose" by von Ahn, who has shown that presenting a useful task, which requires human intelligence, in the form of an on-line game can motivate a large amount of people to work heavily on this task, and this for free.

The documentation of Enterprise Research Planning (ERP) systems is usually (1) extremely large and (2) combines various views from the business and the technical implementation perspective. Also, a very specific vocabulary has evolved, in particular in the SAP domain (e.g. SAP Solution Maps or SAP software module names). This vocabulary is not clearly mapped to business management terminology and concepts. In this project, we evaluate the use of ontologies and automatic annotation of such large HTML software documentation in order to improve the usability and accessibility, namely of ERP help files.

GenTax: A Generic Algorithm for Deriving Consistent OWL and RDF-S Ontologies from Taxonomies, Thesauri, and Classifications

Hierarchical classifications are likely the largest asset we can exploit for building domain ontologies for the Semantic Web. Unfortunately, they mostly suffer from numerous conceptual inconsistencies, in particular regarding the semantics of the hierarchy relation, which makes deriving OWL ontologies a non-trivial task. The GenTax algorithms uses a straightforward heuristic in combination with random samples in order to produce consistent, lightweight ontologies from hierarchical classifications with minimal human intervention.

eClassOWL: The first real ontology for products and services

Products and services categorization standards (PSCS), like UNSPSC, eCl@ss, eOTD, or the RosettaNet Technical Dictionary (RNTD) form a valuable set of concepts from the product and services domain and reflect some degree of consensus. They are thus a promising foundation for the creation of products and services ontologies. Existing approaches for this task, however, do neither properly reflect the specific semantics of the respective categorization standards, nor do they sufficiently address the high versioning dynamics due to product innovation. In this project we are developing a comprehensive approach for the proper reuse of such standards in product ontologies and are continously releasing current OWL DLP/Lite versions of eCl@ss.